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One gap in the mortar behind the sapling turns into a crack running lengthways through a brick. That crack becomes a missing brick. When An enters SEKAI in the afternoon, one missing brick has become four, a tiny hole in a wall taller than all of them if they stacked leg to shoulder on top of each other. Len squats down beside it, going “hmm,” like he’s a kid watching a particularly interesting bug inch across the path. Not that An ever really did that.
An squats down beside him. Real-world Tokyo’s getting warmer, with good weather all round. She keeps her phone angled up when she goes on walks so that the Kagamines can peer up at the bright leaves and new shoots of spring, and shows MEIKO pastries on display in the windows of bakeries. Happiness, or maybe contentment, buoys her steps.
“Look,” Len says, pointing at the gap. Half-hidden by the leaves, it’s low enough to the ground that An has to squish herself lower to see through it, pressing her face close to the brick like it’s a peephole. “I think it’s a fragment of feelings. But it feels…”
“Different?” An says.
“Yeah!” Len agrees. “Different.”
It kind of reminds her of her fragment of feelings, An thinks, just… turned on its head. If the streets were all inverted and flowers sprouted sideways from the mortar, then her fragment might come closer to it. Or maybe—she checks the well of feeling under her fingertips—maybe it’s like standing on the edge of a fragment and the SEKAI she loves, bracing herself to go back, not yet to the real world, but to her world. An’s balancing on the seam of two worlds, watching them both turn at different paces.
Past the brick, past the white fog of another world, there is a path ringed in flowers, all pink-and-white daisies dappled with sunlight trickling in past the trees. An knows, somehow, an instinct that she doesn’t question or examine too closely, that if she follows the path she’ll come to a bench by the seaside, looking out at a plane of soft white sand. Whatever this is, fragment or otherwise, it’s hers. It’s hers, and if she touches it too closely, An feels like she’ll tumble over the edge and never be able to find her way back.
“Definitely not a fragment,” An says, pressing herself flat against the ground.
Which is when someone runs past. A tiny figure, barely half her height, spinning in circles down the path through the wall and laughing to herself, her arms flung up as she goes. She dances in and out of the sunlight, looking for all the world like a mirage or a dream that An conjured up. She’s a happy child, vivid with life, practically glowing with it, and she’s familiar. So, so familiar.
There are flowers in her hair, woven in loosely and tumbling out behind her. Lady’s mantle sways behind her. As a girl, An used to run through Vivid Street freely, stopping and starting and skipping along, saying hello to everyone she recognised. She knew everyone from the record store and almost everyone who’d been out singing the night before, and she knew all the employees at the conbini and everyone who came down to sit and chat with her dad and Uncle Taiga and Aunt Nagi. She used to come home with a wide grin and her spoils tucked under her arms—the punnets of fruits that hadn’t been sold, single flowers from the florist’s, lists of albums that would be releasing soon and that everyone thought she’d like—and happiness filling her up to the brim. Aunt Nagi used to cut up peaches and nectarines for her, giving her a kiss on the forehead before she went home.
For a long time after An was told the truth, the grief would hit her first. She’d think about her Aunt Nagi who she loved and feel the tears sting at her eyes, and then she’d try and turn that grief into momentum, the same way Nagi did when she was pushing RADder further forward. The months would mellow it out; she’d start looking back to her childhood, skinning her knees and hanging cheerfully from Nagi’s arms, and feel the old grief, yes, but beneath it, growing up from the ground, there was the fondness, the love.
This child, grinning and joyous, her knees grass-stained and flowers slipping out of her hair, is full of that happiness. Flowers for stars, her hair pulled up and out of her eyes, dye falling away, An recognises her. It’s An.
The thing is, An remembers being a kid. An remembers being full of love and flying freely, Vivid Street’s comfort the wings at her back. Mostly, An remembers the love. Her dad and her mom cooking together in the evenings, Aunt Nagi picking her up and letting her sit on her shoulders and taking pictures of the two of them smiling together, Uncle Taiga letting her cling on to him when she wanted to sneak into events. All that love and a life full of music, coming from every nook of the town that she loves.
Tiny little Shiraishi An through the gap in the bricks turns around, beaming. An can’t remember if she ever looked like this. She’s speaking to someone, lifting her hands up and waving, and An sees—Nagi, looking the way she did before she died, ruffling the little An’s hair and bringing her up in a hug. An’s breath hitches in her chest. Her hand presses flat against the brick wall, curling around the hole in it.
“An,” someone says beside her. She can’t bring herself to look away, doesn’t even think she can feel her breath in her chest, like a tidal wave is catching up with her all of a sudden. An didn’t even know she’d been running from it. She hadn’t noticed Len leaving, either, or the worried shadow Miku casts behind her, or the time slipping away.
“She’s right there,” An whispers. “Nagi-san, I… I…”
Miku’s hand is familiar on her back, too. “I know.” Not in the same way that Nagi is and will always be, but in the routine sense, because Miku had done it so many times when An pulled herself into their SEKAI, over practices running long and her feelings growing too big inside her and drinks she stirred until they got cold and cakes she broke down, over and over, under a fork on a plate in craze café. “But you know you can’t stay here, don’t you?”
“I know.”
An peers past the fog. Light falls on Nagi’s hair so that she’s glowing as she spins An around and around, kissing her on the forehead with every rotation. That Shiraishi An is so full of life, so full of love, she’s so lucky with everything she has. Nagi spins her around until she’s laughing and then she walks, An’s childhood and An’s love nestled against her shoulder, not towards the bench overlooking the sea that An knows exists, but back, towards the An watching them.
Tiny little Shiraishi An waves up at her, her smile wide and kind. She reaches out and it feels like she’s tilting a camera, the way the fuzzy world in the gap narrows, her little cheek pressed up against an invisible panel of glass. “I love you,” she says, and her voice is so small. She’s just so small. Tears spring to An’s eyes. “So much, okay? And Aunt Nagi does too. And we’re gonna be here forever, because you love us too, but you’ve gotta stay there.”
An thinks, all of a sudden, of her team. The four of them sweating and stuck together and unable to stop smiling, the music pulsing through her bones, the lights shining down on them, illuminating their faces, An had thought, this is where I want to be for the rest of my life. On stage, lifting them and being lifted up.
“Okay,” An whispers. She doesn’t remember being as small as this, but she does remember squishing her face against the windows of the record stores and humming delightedly at all the new releases. “I love you too. You can—go home. I’ll be waiting here.” She lets go of the crack in the brick, wipes tears from her eyes. “And tell Nagi-san I love her, alright?”
An laughs at her. “She already knows, silly!”
Like it was never there, the gap in the brick seals shut. An runs her fingers over it, Miku’s hand steady on her back, and lets the tears fall. She just—she loves Nagi, so much it spills over the edges, and she loves her team and the SEKAI she built, and she loves the child she used to be and the An she’s growing into. “I just miss her so much,” she says, knowing Miku knows. Happy tears and sad tears all at once.
“I know,” Miku says. “We all miss her. Even though we didn’t know her, we love her, because you loved her enough that it’s been written into the whole world.”
She doesn’t know how long she sits there. Miku rubs her back and sits quietly with her. The leaves of the sapling, impossibly taller behind her and casting its gentle shadow, sway in the breeze. It’s bright and beautiful. “I’ll be okay,” An says eventually. She remembers the other An’s wide, happy smile. “I have everyone here, after all.”